I ripped Carlo's head off because it was a complete coincidence that I happenned to be fuming about that very RTFM emoticon moments earlier.

Well, I'm not for ripping anyone's head off, especially Carlo's, but I'm glad you spoke up about that RTFM icon. I think the Ubuntu forum has a good attitude about respect which is what we have here BTW. They have done a better job of expressing it. I'm going to lift some of that wording and add it to our conditions of use statement. I think one could say, "it's in the manual" instead of RTFM.

I deeply apologize if anyone felt offended. please remove the f***ing emoticon in order to sanitize the forum I stupidly thought that if it was there (the emoticon) I was allowed to use it without being censored but maybe I was wrong, anyway...I don't even know what ubuntu is _________________homepage - blog - forum - youtube

Quote:

Politics is the entertainment division of the military industrial complex - Frank Zappa

One of the main problems is that a lot of this computer stuff hasn't got a decent manual at all- so RTFM bares no relavence anyway.

In my experience of software- a lot of the time it's a well written manual that makes good software a hit.

Okay sometimes this isn't always the case- as good software should be easy to figure out, but for the majority of times this isn't the case.

I really don't like manuals at all- especially having to build a picture of what is to be achieved in my head by having to collate info from various opinions on a web forum.

Some people would call this being lazy. I strongly dispute that. It's about having the powers to concentrate on a single item in mind. Some people are good at this- some aren't. I most definately fall in to the second catagory.

If you liked Ubuntu, you might also like Knoppix. It's probably the most "famous" of Live CD's, because it was basically the first (or at least, the first very successful Live CD). Both are derivatives of Debian Linux, which has a strong "Open Source Only" attitude, though these derivatives are a bit more lazy about that.

I've haven't found any info on this for Ubuntu, but it may also be possible.

If you do install to it's own partition on a new drive, you will do a couple of things:
1.) Create a new partition for Linux's SWAP partition. This is basically an extension of your RAM into your hard disk. Both Windows and Macs do this as well. Linux keeps a seperate partition for it, so it can not corrupt, or be corrupted, by the other partitions of programs running. This is usually 2x your RAM size.

2.) Create a /boot directory. This is usually very small, like 50MB or so. It handles only the boot stuff, and is generally formatted as "ext2" type. I'll explain below.

3.) Create a /root partition. This will hold everything for the install, if you so choose. You can go further, and create partitions for "/home" and "/var". /home is YOUR USER data. Most of your personal data and files is kept here. /var is for extensions to the linux install, compiling your own programs from source, etc. Again, these are broken up for performance, stability, and security. It's rolled over from the days when drives where small, and a unix install would support hundreds of user accounts. I'd recommend just going with "/root", and linux will handle everything from there.

Notes on File System(FS) Types:
Windows uses 2 basic FS types: NTFS and FAT32. FAT32 is older. NTFS is newer, and more stabile. This is what you probably have XP installed as. You'll notice, if windows crashes, it doesn't run a "check disk" utility, like it used to in win98. That's because NTFS is a journaled file system, so on the disk, the OS keeps track of the work it is doing to & from the disk. So if anything crashes, it can re-trace it's steps and files won't get corrupted.

In Linux, there are MANY types of partitions. Choices, choices. Some are older but always still supported, some are designed for speed, smaller files, or for stability. Linux can access FAT32 drives, and can read NTFS, but can't write to NTFS reliably just yet. So if you ever want to pass data between Linux & windows on the same PC (like saving .wav files, or MP3's that you might access in both realms), create a FAT32 for data on this new drive of yours.

The most common and "stabile" (read- tested & proven) filesystem in Linux is EXT3. EXT2 is older, and used for things like boot because it's simple. EXT3 is a nice balance for small & large file sizes, and good performance. REISERFS is the next step, and added Journaling (like NTFS copied). I like REISERFS the best, and if offered, you should choose this one. It is one of the fastest at handling most file sizes, and is very stabile in not corrupting data due to bad disk accesses, etc. It might not be the default, so look for it during the install.

It explains how to resize an existing windows partition. I reckon that you will need 10Gb for a working linux install. The swap space should be big enough at 500Mb, leaving 9.5 ± Gb for the system and fun.

This approach worked fine for me, but as always, make a backup of anything you CAN'T afford to lose.

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